Please have a teacher make a deep review of the course

[dekoza]

As a teacher I have to say that this course is not very well designed in terms of learning curve. The golden rule of all good handbooks is to make solid grounds - explain and excercise easy things and then gradually introduce more complex topics. I found that just at the very beginning of "Introduction to Python" the reader is bashed with methods and dot notation in VERY confusing way that almost stops them from further reading. It's supposed to be introduction for newbies! Let them play with numbers and strings, give them lists and dictionaries. And then introduce objects with their attributes and methods.

Having said all that I urge you to hand this course to at least a couple of CS teachers and note their comments. I will help as much as I can but unfortunatelly I don't have that much time.

[keikoro]

???

Did you even read the GitBook? The "Introduction to Python" chapter contains the very things you complain are missing, nameley an introduction to strings, integers, lists and dictionaries - as well as invitations to play around with these.

I find your comment to be very rude, and your putting so much emphasis on being a teacher makes you come across as self-important. Being a teacher doesn't magically make you know every little thing better/best. But thanks for speaking for beginners when you note that the tutorial "almost stops them from further reading". Not.

This is not material for a course covering a whole semester, it's a tutorial for a one-day introductory workshop to Django.

Annoyed,
a participant in the first ever Django Girls workshop

[keikoro]

(Everyone is welcome to help improve the tutorial, and quite a bunch of people - including participants in the first workshop - have already done so, but calling the tutorial more or less crap from a learning perspective is definitely not cool.)

[asendecka]

Please, calm down :).

@dekoza has a point and we are grateful for this comment. We know we need to improve the tutorial and we hope to make it better! We are prepared for critic and we welcome it :). Thank you for sharing!

@kerstin I'm super happy the tutorial worked for you and you raise a good point - it's one day workshop and we can't cover everything. However we can, as @dekoza suggested, organie it better. Maybe we can add some extra homework chapters or link to good resources?

It is very hard to balance things - we are limited in time (for one-day event), but we also need to think about people who work with tutorial alone at home and has no coach that will explain missing parts.

[keikoro]

Of course feedback and (constructive) criticism are great and valuable, and sure the tutorial can and should be further improved, but to criticise non-issues (the chapter in question already does what was said it was lacking) and to suggest the tutorial needs to be cross-checked by teachers to be usable, thereby insinuatining that only teachers hold the authority to judge something as educational, are not so much, imho...

[keikoro]

(To clarify: I didn't take issue with there being criticism raised, but with how it was put forward.)

[dekoza]

I don't complain about the book missing something. I complain about clarity and order of introduction & explanation of certain topics. About "stopping from further reading": my GF really tried with this book and she was very confused and somewhat frustrated that the book expects some knowledge that she doesn't have.

@kerstin that's great that you've been at the workshop but please keep one thing in mind: I'm almost certain that there was at least one tutor available who explained everything in her own words, answered questions etc. This book AFAIK is supposed to sum up the course material and be used as a stand-alone handbook. If so, the material should be arranged in a way that is easy to understand for someone who has near-to-none experience with programming.

I'm sorry for confessing that I'm a teacher but nevertheless I feel that someone who actually tries really hard to explain things to people has something to say about the education process and how to put knowledge in a proper manner.

[asendecka]

I think there is a misunderstanding here :). This is not a stand-alone book, but a tutorial for Django Girls workshop. The main idea is that each 3-person group has a mentor available for any question they may have.

But we are aware that more and more people are trying it alone. And for those people it could be hard. We are improving the tutorial, but we have also limited resources and time. Our main focus is workshops and for those tutorial seems to be good enough.

We will try make it better though and I am happy to receive the feedback on the structure and possible problems people have with it. Thank you!